We went to Old Sturbridge Village today. The admission gates were a time portal that took us back nearly two hundred years to a New England farm village in 1830. I do love this sort of thing! All of the homes and buildings are authentic historical structures that were relocated to the museum's site. We explored two churches (or meeting houses), a little one room school, a general mercantile, a blacksmith, tinsmith, cooper, cobbler, and three different mills (a carding mill [for wool], a sawmill, and a grist mill), a bank, a lawyer's office, a parsonage, three working farms, and several homes.

The photos above are of the finest home in the village: the Salem Towne House. It is an elegant-two story Federal Style house built in 1796 that belonged to the Towne family of Salem, Massachusetts, who owned a three hundred acre farm (the typical farm in Massachusetts was about eighty acres.) The Townes were descendants of the three Towne sisters who were accused as witches in the infamous Salem Witch Trials (of whom two--Rebecca Towne Nurse and Mary Towne Easty--were executed).

But what fascinates me most about history is not the major events and those who were involved in them, but rather the everyday lives of ordinary people. Today I learned that a typical New England farm wife spent the first half of her day preparing breakfast and dinner while tackling tough and messy chores like laundry and cheese making. Dinner was the biggest meal of the day and was served at noon. In the afternoon, she worked on lighter tasks like gardening, sewing and knitting. In the evening was supper, a simple meal of cold left-overs.

One of my favorite houses was a tiny two-room cottage built in the 18th century. It had a rustic, story-book quality that I loved. We were told that throughout its history it had been inhabited by two to ten people at a time. A double bed provided room for two-plus sleepers. When my mother was growing up on a dairy farm in upstate New York, she shared a bed with her two sisters. She said that it was a common practice years ago. Times have certainly changed. Isn't it strange that we spend our childhoods learning to sleep alone, only to have to figure out how to share a bed with someone when we're grown?

It was a glorious day of white, painterly clouds sailing across a dazzling, blue sky, and of sheep grazing in daisy-studded pastures.